This article explores the links between citizenship and race in second-language education through an examination of the ways in which citizenship is linked to English language proficiency within a key Canadian federal adult English as a Second Language assessment document, the "Canadian Language Benchmarks" ("CLB"). It uses data and updates the analysis from a previously treated study that compared the way in which citizenship was conceptualised within that document with a sampling of adult second-language learners in a federally funded ESL programme. The participants in the study from which these data are drawn described becoming Canadians predominantly in terms of human rights, multicultural policy, and the obligations of being citizens. The "CLB," however, rarely referred to citizenship in these terms. Instead, it described being Canadian in terms of normative standards, including various forms of social behaviour, which implied the existence of a dominant and singular culture to which second-language learners had to conform. This article argues that these normative standards have the effect of racialising second-language learners in this context.